This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Philadelphia Mural Arts with events all month long.

Each October brings Mural Arts Month, a celebration of public art from the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. This year the festivities include a diverse array of events including a photo exhibition, mural dedications, tours and artist talks centered on the theme of Art Ignites Change. Highlights include a TED-inspired event headlined by artists and activists, a block party with Philadelphia’s hottest DJ’s and a concert series featuring original music inspired by murals.This Mural Arts Month is the capstone to the program’s 30th anniversary year, which also included the publication of a new book about the Mural Arts Program, Jane Golden and David Updike’s Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30. The new book traces the program’s history and evolution, acknowledging the challenges and rewards of growth and change while maintaining a core commitment to social, personal, and community transformation. It’s a celebration of and guide to the program’s success, and includes essays by policy makers, curators, scholars, and educators.

Here are just a few of the ways you can join us in celebrating Mural Arts Month this year:

Photo Exhibition Reception: The border is an invitation 02 October 2014, 06:00 PM – 08:00 PM The Lincoln Financial Mural Arts Center at the Thomas Eakins House 1727-29 Mt. Vernon Street (19130)
Mural Arts hosts an exhibition of renowned photojournalist Martha Cooper’s photographic preservation of graffiti and Steve Weinik’s documentation of psychylustro by Katharina Grosse. psychylustro is an episodic painting of massive abstract fields of color installed along passages of the Northeast Rail Corridor between Philadelphia’s 30th Street and North Philadelphia Stations, the same passages where Cooper documented graffiti before psychylustro was installed.

Presented in cooperation with Amtrak, psychylustro has been supported by: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, National Endowment for the Arts, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Fierce Advocacy Fund, PTS Foundation, AT&T, Philadelphia Zoo, Joe and Jane Goldblum, David and Helen Pudlin, halfGenius, and The Beneficial Foundation with support for the exhibition publication from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Media Partners: WHYY’s NewsWorks.org, Metro Newspaper.

A conversation on abstraction and social imagination with psychylustro curator Elizabeth Thomas and artist and writer Douglas Ashford, Associate Professor at Cooper Union and former member of Group Material.

How can a train ride become a voyage of the imagination? psychylustro, a collaboration between artist Katharina Grosse and the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, is an episodic painting of abstract fields of color along the Northeast Rail Corridor’s natural and built environment that will transform over time as the elements gradually reclaim the space.

Presented as part of DesignPhiladelphia, a Center for Architecture Event. Presented in cooperation with Amtrak, psychylustro has been supported by: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, National Endowment for the Arts, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Fierce Advocacy Fund, PTS Foundation, AT&T, Philadelphia Zoo, Joe and Jane Goldblum, David and Helen Pudlin, halfGenius, and The Beneficial Foundation with support for the exhibition publication from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Media Partners: WHYY’s NewsWorks.org, Metro Newspaper.

Celebrate Philadelphia’s diverse and creative voices in the Southeast by Southeast Project – a collaboration between the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, and the Refugee Mental Health Collaborative. First, enjoy a guided walking tour and book release to learn about the vibrant Burmese, Bhutanese, and Nepali communities and the community’s stunning public art. Then, enjoy a concert by the American Composers Forum featuring original music.
Presented as part of DesignPhiladelphia, a Center for Architecture Event. Project sponsors: Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, Hummingbird Foundation, Philadelphia Refugee Mental Health Collaborative Event partner: American Composers Forum – Philadelphia Chapter Concert funded by: William Penn Foundation – Community Partners Program through a grant to American Composers Foundation

Philadelphia is a fascinating place, with many assets, a variety of challenges and great ambitions. In order to meet the challenges facing our city, we need to connect with a diverse group of committed citizens and to nourish everything we do with imagination, creativity and collaboration. Together we can transform public spaces and community expectations, using art and design to improve Philadelphia. That is why we are expanding our muraLAB initiative with an exciting new annual event. On October 14th, please join us for muraLAB: Live, where we will hear from an inimate group of unique and creative people who understand, in their own way, the role art plays in improving the civic landscape of cities.

For thirty years, the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program has cultivated the work of artists who undertake community-based public projects, developing our own unique blend of social practice art making. muraLAB is the Mural Arts Program’s creativity hub for investigating muralism in the twenty-first century – a think-tank for advancing Mural Arts’ vision for art igniting change in communities, city systems and artistic practice. Through muraLAB, we highlight how other artists and types of institutions – artist collaboratives, museums, city agencies, universities – are developing their own social practice projects and using art to ignite change in their communities, and we build on the last 5 years of redefining, broadening and deepening the scope of our own artistic and social practice. Event partner: WHYY

Philly DJ Mural Block Party 17 October 2014, 06:00 PM – 08:00 PM 13th & Chestnut Streets (19107)
It’s an all-ages block party with live entertainment, food and fun! A line-up of the city’s best DJ’s will provide sounds, alongside the best of Scratch DJ Academy.

“What a disgrace to a city calling itself free, that inhabitants, guiltless of offence, and seeking to perform their duties conscientiously, should be condemned to live in such incessant fear, and have nowhere to turn for protection. This state of things, of course, gave rise to many impromptu vigilance committees. Every colored person, and every friend of their persecuted race, kept their eyes wide open.”

Another New York Times piece, Bright Passages, Along the Northeast Corridor, published on July 24, celebrated the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. The article showcased the five-mile stretch in Philadelphia that features, what the article described as “Christo-esque installations of seven enormous works of art by the Berlin-based visual artist Katharina Grosse, entitled, ‘psychylustro'”

Jane Golden, Executive Director of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program for 30 years, co-edited Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30, with David Updike, an editor in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s publishing department. Their book showcases the results of 21 projects completed since 2009 and features essays by policy makers, curators, scholars, and educators that offer valuable lessons for artists, activists, and communities to emulate. Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30 traces the program’s history and evolution, acknowledging the challenges and rewards of growth and change while maintaining a core commitment to social, personal, and community transformation.

Cwiek writes, “Due to an impasse with union representatives, SEPTA’s management only recognizes the same-sex marriages of its non-union workers for the purpose of workplace benefits.”

Miriam Frank’s recent publication, Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America, chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers in the 1970s and 1980s.

Frank provides an inclusive history of the convergence of labor and LGBT interests. She carefully details how queer caucuses in local unions introduced domestic partner benefits and union-based AIDS education for health care workers-innovations that have been influential across the U.S. workforce. Out in the Union also examines organizing drives at queer workplaces, campaigns for marriage equality, and other gay civil rights issues to show the enduring power of LGBT workers.

In this blog entry, David Updike, co-editor of Philadelphia’s Mural Arts @ 30, offers his thoughts on the book and what he learned about Mural Arts along the way.

I think it’s safe to say that over the last thirty years, Philadelphia has become a city of murals. As you crisscross the city, you find them in just about every neighborhood, often where you’d least expect them. They’ve become a part of our landscape, and something that people here and elsewhere associate with Philadelphia. A lot of the credit for that goes to Jane Golden, because it wouldn’t have happened without her energy and her vision, but it also wouldn’t have been possible if the city itself hadn’t embraced the idea that public art matters. And it matters, not just because it improves our aesthetic environment, but more importantly, because it has a lasting impact on the people who participate in the process.

The Mural Arts offices are a buzzing hive of activity. In the hallways you pass a steady stream of people coming and going, to and from mural sites, or classes, or canvassing neighborhoods. And these are people who, to borrow an old phrase from Bill Clinton, look like Philadelphia. They’re young and old, they’re black, white, Asian, Hispanic. And they all carry themselves with a sense of purpose. In the gallery downstairs you’ll see exhibitions of art—some of it quite remarkable—made by everyone from elementary school students to inmates serving life sentences at Graterford. And then there’s the room upstairs with the very skylight under which Thomas Eakins painted The Gross Clinic. And I suspect that our city’s greatest painter, were he alive today, would approve of this populist endeavor, which seeks to embrace the city he loved in all of its aspects.

I’m very fortunate to work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one of our city’s other great cultural institutions. And it occurred to me as I started working on this book that, in a way, the Art Museum and the Mural Arts Program have opposite but entirely complementary missions. At the Museum we work very hard to get people to come to us and experience great art. But Mural Arts brings art to the people in the places where they live and work. And what Mural Arts brings to these communities is not a particular product or aesthetic. Rather, it’s a process of engagement and dialogue and co-creation that takes place over months and years, and whose effects remain long after the paint on the walls has dried.

This book seeks, above all else, to document what takes place off the walls. And really, this gets to the heart and soul of what Mural Arts does. Yes, it’s about transforming places, but mostly it’s about transforming people. We wanted to look at that process and its effects through many lenses, so we brought together a diverse group of authors from different disciplines—social sciences, public health, art education, restorative justice—to paint as broad a picture as possible of what a socially engaged art practice looks like, and what it can do, especially when it works in tandem with other organizations to address big issues like homelessness, youth violence, or urban blight.

In the book, Jeremy Nowack aptly refers to what happens in the course of creating a mural as a kind of “social contract” that arises between all of the stakeholders involved in a project—neighbors, business owners, community leaders, schools, artists. And the key word here is “stakeholders.” People feel a sense of investment and ownership in the murals. They take pride in them. They show them off to visitors. New stories and rituals grow up around them. People now ride the Market-Frankford El in West Philly just to see Steve Powers’ 50 Love Letters unfold. Inspired by the murals, couples have gotten engaged and even married on that 20-block stretch along Market Street.

Other stories around the murals are more painful, more challenging, but also rewarding in ways that aren’t necessarily visible to someone looking only at the end result. A particularly poignant example is James Burns’s Finding the Light Within, which took on the issue of youth suicide, not just with a very powerful and personal mural, but also with community meetings, writing workshops, collage workshops, and a participatory blog, all of which provided safe, supportive spaces in which survivors could share their stories. More than 800 people participated in those activities, and hopefully found some measure of healing in the process.

Elizabeth Thomas begins her essay with a provocative question: “Who makes culture?” In other words, Who decides what messages we see and read and hear? Whose stories count? Every day we’re bombarded by images and messages that tell us what we should wear, eat, drink, watch, listen to. But how often do we see our own struggles and achievements reflected in our environment, or our own stories projected into the public discourse? Socially engaged art practice has begun to address this problem of who gets represented—and who does the representing—in public culture. It’s happening in different ways in different cities around the country, but in Philadelphia its most visible proponent is the Mural Arts Program.

Much of the work that Mural Arts has done in recent years has sought to expand the definition of what a mural is and what it can do. For the mural project called Peace Is a Haiku Song, the poet Sonia Sanchez initiated what became, in essence, a citywide collaborative poem cycle. She began with a mental image of haiku by children hanging like cherry blossoms from the trees in Philadelphia. This evolved into an invitation to people of all ages to contribute poems in a series of community workshops and through a dedicated website. The poems didn’t end up hanging from the trees, but many of them ended up on posters around the city that were created by youth working with graphic designer Tony Smyrski.

The experience of seeing your own words and your own images projected into the world is an empowering one, especially for young people. As Cynthia Weiss points out, kids participating in mural projects often gain practical, real-world skills, like photography and graphic design. But they also gain a sense of agency that may be hard to come by elsewhere in their lives. And that type of experience can have a lasting impact on a person’s life in ways that we’re really only beginning to understand.

This is the essence of what Mural Arts does. It’s about creating situations in which people are drawn out of their everyday selves and both challenged and empowered to reach for something more. So while this book marks a milestone in the history of the Mural Arts Program, our hope is that it also points the way forward for others who want to use the power of art to change things for the better.

Barbara Krauthamer, who attended the ceremony, gave the following acceptance speech:

Thank you to the NAACP and to everybody. It is wonderful to be here. My co-author Dr. Deborah Willis could not be here, but I know that she joins me in thanking all of you. We’d like to thank our editor Janet Francendese and everybody at Temple University Press; all of the librarians and archivists who helped us. When we dreamed of this book ten years ago we wanted to create a collective family album of photographs that showed African American survival, dignity and beauty, even through the most trying times of slavery and the triumph of emancipation and freedom. Thank you, and we wanted to dedicate this to our mothers and to those who made a way when there was no way so we could be here today. Thank you.And here are some images from the NAACP Image Awards ceremony:

Four nationally-renowned innovators in art as a social practice come together in Philadelphia to present their work for one night only. In a series of TED-style presentations, they’ll inspire you to reimagine what art can look like when whole communities get involved. Presentations by nationally-renowned presenters include:

muraLab is the Mural Arts Program’s experimental creativity hub for investigating muralism in the twenty-first century. During Beyond the Paint: Philadelphia’s Mural Arts, two muraLab programs will take place inside the exhibition to explore art as a social practice.

February 5th, 2014 6pm: Jon Rubin on Contextual Practice
Artist Jon Rubin – best known for his project Conflict Kitchen – is the director of the Contextual Practice program at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art. He recently collaborated with art consultant Barbara Goldstein on ARTPGH, a master plan for public art in Pittsburgh.

The book features six essays and visual documentation to illustrate the growth of Mural
Arts in scale, practice, and engagement for over thirty years. Cynthia Weiss, a renowned
art educator, and contributor to Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30, will give a keynote address.
A light reception and book signing with Jane Golden will follow.

Temporary Services (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer) produce exhibitions, publications, public interventions, events, and other projects in a socially engaged practice that purposely blurs the lines between artist, activist, and enthusiast. Currently, their Self-Reliance Library is installed in PAFA’s galleries as part of the Beyond the Paint exhibition.

Community Art Days

All community art-making programs take place inside the exhibition from 12 – 3 on Sunday afternoons.

February 9 Meet artist Ernel Martinez and participate in a group art-making project.

March 9 Meet artist Eric Okdeh and participate in a group art-making project.

March 16 Join artist Josh MacPhee and community members to screen print 3 x 4 foot broadsides by hand inside the galleries.

Talks and Workshops

All talks and workshops begin at 2 pm and take place in the Hamilton Building.

February 16 Restored Spaces Mural Arts’ Restored Spaces program presents current and past projects that help to cultivate a more sustainable ethos and strengthen community. Hear from Restored Spaces founder Shari Hersh and artists who work at the intersection of art and design and the environment, including Stacy Levy and Kaitlin Kylie Pomerantz.

March 30 Mural Preservation and Restoration The process of keeping murals looking their best is not an easy one. Meet the artists who undertake this task for a presentation of the before and after effects of restoring our city’s artistic treasures and a demonstration of their materials.

The book I’m planning to read over the holiday — in preparation for the “sequel” that’s due early this Spring — is Robert Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists. It’s one of his earliest novels, and I’m excited that he’s returning to this story and continuing it, since it speaks (like so much of his work) powerfully to the ideas of what makes up the American character.

2013 was a great year for big novels from emerging and established writers, and the very best I read this year had to be Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, a book that was at once really economical in style but epic in scope: about 70s radicals, motorcycles, Italy and America. I don’t think I’m the only one who thought of Don DeLillo when reading Kushner’s wonderful novel.

Sara Cohen, Rights and Contracts Manager

The best TUP book to give? My loved one are going to have to wait until Presidents’ Day to receive their Christmas gifts so that I can give them Thomas Foster’s Sex and the Founding Fathers.

The book I most want to receive for the holidays? The first book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. A friend sent me Zadie Smith’s New York Review of Books piece “Man vs. Corpse,” which cites My Struggle, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it ever since. I also hope to receive a vegan cookbook (maybe Veganomicon) so that I can start the new year off with good dietary intentions.

The book I plan to read over the break? I’m supposed to be reading A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn with my husband and one of our friends. I’m going to spend the break trying to catch up to the two of them.

Aaron Javsicas, Senior Editor

Earlier this year I read and very much enjoyed Red Plenty,by Francis Spufford. It’s engrossing historical fiction about what it might have been like to live in the Khrushchev-era Soviet Union, and to feel real optimism about the country’s future even while beginning to see cracks that would spread and destroy it.

I look forward to reading and giving Temple University Press’s Philadelphia murals books Philadelphia Murals and the Stories they Tell, and More Philadelphia Murals the the Stories They Tell, as a new volume, Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30, is forthcoming in 2014. I’m from Philadelphia but only recently moved back, after thirteen years in New York, to come on board at the Press. The terrific Mural Arts Program expanded a great deal while I was gone, and I’m excited to catch up with it through these beautiful books.

Charles Ault, Production Director

This year I read A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, which is now on my all-time favorites list. Ruth Ozeki is a 40-ish Buddhist priest who lives with her husband on an island near Vancouver, Canada. Her book features a writer named Ruth who lives with her husband on an island near Vancouver. She discovers the diary of a 16-year-old Japanese girl in a waterproofed bundle that washes up on the shore. The girl is contemplating suicide and has decided to write down the story of her grandmother, a Buddhist nun, as her last act. We (the reader) read pieces of the diary as Ruth does and then we read Ruth’s reaction to the same thing we just read (and reacted to). But I haven’t mentioned the Zen philosophy and ritual that pervades the story. Or the discussion of quantum mechanics. Or contemporary Japanese pornography….

Joan Vidal, Production Manager

The best TUP book to give: If you have a group of friends who like to read and discuss books, I recommend Erich Goode’s Justifiable Conduct . Filled with examples from the memoirs of public figures who seek absolution for their transgressions, this book is sure to spark conversation.

The best book I read this year? The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. This year’s National Book Award fiction winner is the wild story about John Brown and his raid, narrated by a freed slave boy masquerading as a girl. It’s hilarious.

The best TUP book to give this season is Never Easy, Never Pretty by Dean Bartoli Smith. My father has been a Ravens fan his whole life and reminisces about going to games with his father when he was growing up. This book is perfect for him and perfect for any other Ravens’ fan or football fan in general.

The book I plan to read over break is Karla Erickson’s How We Die Now. What better way to celebrate the holidays with my immediate family and older relatives than to evaluate my own mortality and the cost of living longer? Also a perfect gift for my great Aunt Lenora who will be celebrating her 82nd birthday this January.

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

WHAT I WILL GIVE: Music, Style, and Aging by Andy Bennett. Because holidays should be filled with sex, drugs, rock and roll and reading, right?

WHAT I WILL READ: Ink, by Sabrina Vourvoulias (one of the co-authors of 200 Years of Latino History in Philadelphia by the staff of Al Día). Ink looks at immigration issues through multiple lenses and I really admire Vourvoulias’ work.

THE BEST BOOK I READ IN 2013: Night Film, by Marisha Pessl, is not so much a book you read as a story you investigate. It involves a disgraced journalist and a cult filmmaker, whose daughter has died—or possibly been murdered. What’s intriguing is not just the mystery, but the format of the book: an impressive collection of photographs, website downloads, dossiers, missing persons reports, institution assessments, and created articles. It’s a fascinating interactive experience.

WHAT I WANT TO READ: I’m almost ashamed to admit that I really want to read James Franco’s Actors Anonymous. I’m an unabashed Francofile and a completist. I’ll also likely see his film adaptation of As I Lay Dying over the break as well.

With the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination coming up this Friday, the air and cable waves have been jammed with recollections, profiles and anecdotes about the slain president and his administration. PBS devoted four hours to JFK on the American Experience, NOVA took another look at the logistics of the killing, The New York Times reported on the meaning and on-going sequester of Jackie’s blood stained pink dress. Even the AARP Newsletter ran a piece by Bob Schieffer about his experience of being in Texas on that fateful day. The list goes on and on

But one of the stranger commemorative events is taking place at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth in an exhibition featuring the art that was collected and displayed in Suite 850 of the Texas Hotel where the Kennedys spent their last night together. The curators, while not wanting to re-create the room exactly, have brought together works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, and Kline that were no doubt put on display to let the well bred first couple know Texans were not totally ignorant about high culture.

This strikes me as among the strangest forms of reenactment yet for an event that has been subjected to all kinds of re-creation, from The Warren Commission, to Hollywood versions in JFK and In the Line of Fire to an episode of Seinfeld (or was that a reenactment of a reenactment?) to a 2004 video game called JFK: Reloaded that places the player in Oswald’s alleged sixth floor window with the rather perverse object being to re-create the shooting just as The Warren Commission described it.

Somewhere Sigmund Freud has a knowing smile as the nation cannot break free of its own repetition compulsion and the killing of JFK. But with the art exhibit in Fort Worth we have moved away from reimagining the public space of Dealey Plaza and into conjuring the private aesthetic experience of the first couple. Why? Having heard from virtually everyone involved in the assassination, from Secret Service agents to Governor and Mrs. Connolly to witness-bystanders, and having participated in the question posed by virtually everyone alive at the time—do you remember where you were when you heard the news?—the only experience not yet tapped is that of the Kennedys. And since we can not get to the heart of their experience, we might substitute for it their experience of the hotel that morning, their waking up to a wall of 20th Century masterpieces.

As I have written about the culture of the Kennedy assassination over the years, I have always been reluctant to speculate about mass psychology, resisting the impulse to diagnose the various national obsessions around JFK and his killing. But with another nod in Freud’s direction, it does seem as though the art exhibit in Fort Worth is one more example of our 50 year old fetish, a need to find substitutes for what we don’t know but wish we did—about the Kennedys, about Oswald’s motives or those of his accomplices (depending on your opinion), about exit and entrance wounds and about what the Sixties might have been had the assassination not happened. We respond to the absence of knowing with a glut of images, recycled footage of Camelot, yet another examination of the Zapruder film, another memoir by someone who claims to have known the private side of the President.

And yet turning our attention to art on this 50th anniversary is not a bad idea. I would suggest however that we look not to what hung in the Texas Hotel but to what got produced within weeks and then within a couple years of the assassination, namely the silkscreen portraits created by Andy Warhol and the underground film masterpiece Report made by Bruce Conner. Indeed, pop artists at the time offered a fascinating reply to the assassination and its afterlife in the pages of Life magazine, the Warren Report and American culture generally. It’s a shame that in the media blitz now attending to JFK’s death, these works are being overlooked. Nearly 50 years after their making, they still present a compelling and visually provocative commentary on the meaning of the JFK assassination, both in its time and ours: Who gets to write the history of an event like this? Who profits from its telling and re-telling? How should we understand the moving image as evidence and window onto the past?